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Writers in movies: The Romantic Englishwoman

The Romantic Englishwoman is a 1975 movie with A-list credentials: it stars Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson, it’s co-written by Tom Stoppard, and it’s directed by Joseph Losey (who also directed Accident and The Go-Between). I love Tom Stoppard, but I hated this movie.

Caine plays a successful novelist and screenwriter; Jackson is his do-nothing, dissatisfied wife. They have a beautiful kid, a beautiful house, beautiful friends, a nanny, but, well, you know. Jackson goes off to Baden Baden for reasons she can’t articulate. Caine is insanely jealous. She comes home and in turn is jealous of him and the nanny. He decides to write a screenplay about all this. He invites the good-looking drug dealer she met in Baden Baden (Helmut Berger) to stay with them, basically trying to stage-manage his screenplay. There are complications. Jackson runs off with the drug dealer; Caine goes in pursuit. They get back together again, in an abrupt ending that neither my wife and I understood in the slightest. But perhaps that’s because we had long since stopped caring. (By the way, that sexy poster has nothing much to do with the movie, although Jackson does have a brief, weird nude scene. It’s kind of depressing to think that she’s now 78. We should all stay young and gorgeous forever!)

You can see that intelligent people were behind the movie. It’s about fiction mirroring reality (or maybe vice versa), and it seems like half the shots in the film involve showing someone’s reflection in a window or a mirror. The plot has the makings of a thriller (the drug dealer is being pursued by bad guys), but the movie shrugs this off in favor of baffling deep meanings. (And the Caine character tells his producer that he doesn’t want to write a thriller.) But the movie didn’t bother making anyone even slightly sympathetic, so I just wasn’t interested in the deep meanings.

Caine’s character isn’t particularly interesting. He’s a selfish jerk, which is of course entirely accurate for a writer, but we don’t get any sense of why he’s so successful, what makes him tick, or how he writes. I can think of a couple dozen Michael Caine movies that I enjoyed more. And virtually anything else by Tom Stoppard.